Case study / Herd Partners

A full development project, replaced by a portal we shipped with AI.

Herd Partners finances livestock for New Zealand dairy farmers on a lease-to-buy basis. We built their website in 2021. In 2025 they came back with something harder: onboarding new clients was still a manual process, and the software to fix it had been quoted as a full development project.

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Client

Herd Partners, New Zealand

Sector

Livestock finance, agribusiness

What we did

Website build, then a custom client onboarding portal

Since

2021. Website first, portal built in 2025

Herd Partners, built in 2021

The problem

Herd Partners came to us in 2021 wanting a modern, clean website. Lease-to-buy livestock finance is not a product farmers arrive already understanding, so the site had to do two jobs at once: explain the offer clearly enough that a farmer could see themselves in it, and turn that interest into enquiries.

That went well. The site did what it was built to do and is still in service today.

In 2025 they came back with a much harder brief. Taking on a new client meant collecting information by email and phone, verifying who the applicant was, running eligibility calculations by hand, and then keeping the applicant informed while it all happened. It worked, but it did not scale and it gave applicants a poor first impression of a finance business.

The conventional answer was a software project, with a development budget and a timeline to match. For a business of Herd Partners' size, that is a lot of money and risk to spend on internal plumbing.

What we built

There were two pieces of work four years apart, and the second only made sense because of how the first had been built.

Built the website, in 2021

We built a clean, modern site that explains the product to farmers first and talks about the company second. There's enough detail for a farmer to work out whether lease-to-buy finance suits them, and a clear path to enquiring once they have.

Wrote the onboarding logic down before building anything

The hard part of the portal was never the interface. It was the eligibility calculations and the decision rules behind them, which had lived in Tim's head and in a spreadsheet. We wrote those out and agreed them first, so by the time we started building there was nothing left to guess.

Built a secure portal with AI instead of a dev team

Applicants verify their email and their phone by SMS before anything reaches review. The calculations run automatically. Behind it sits an admin portal where Herd Partners review applications, see the working, and approve or decline. It all cost a fraction of the quote for a conventional build.

Automated the applicant updates

Emails go out at each stage telling the applicant where they are and what happens next. Nobody has to remember to chase, and applicants stop having to ask, which matters when the thing being decided is finance for their herd.

What changed.

The portal does the job the quoted development project was going to do, and it is still the system new clients come through.

Development project avoided, at a fraction of the quoted cost

2025

The year the portal went live, and it is still in use today

Verification layers, email and SMS, before an application reaches review

Status updates chased by hand. The portal emails applicants at every step.

Where it stands now

The portal is still the system Herd Partners onboard clients through, running day to day without us involved. The website has been live since 2021.

The wider point is that a lot of internal software gets quoted as a project when it is really a workflow with some maths in it. Being able to build that properly and securely, without a development budget, changes which problems are worth solving at all.

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